by David Jason
Ronnie Barker used to say, ‘You can’t be funny on an empty stomach.’ It’s one of the great truths of comedy. Between the dress rehearsal at BBC Television Centre on a Sunday afternoon, and the recording in front of a studio audience, Nick and I would go to the BBC canteen. I would have sausage, chips and beans, and Nick would have egg, chips and beans. Always the same. It became what we did – a ritual, almost a superstition. Sometimes the others would join us, and sometimes they wouldn’t. But that’s where you would find me and Nick.
What Nick and I also shared were bouts of nerves before the recordings. We would be backstage and we would hear the audience come in, hear them get settled, hear the warm-up guy doing his stuff. We’d be pacing backwards and forwards, anxious as mice. We’d say to each other, ‘Why do we do this to ourselves?’ That feeling never changed. We were still the same, twelve years later. You couldn’t not be nervous. You were presenting a new play every week to an audience. There was so much to go wrong. And you had two hours – which sounds like a lot for a half-hour show, which Only Fools was at first, but it really isn’t, because there will be retakes and cameras have to be moved, and sets altered, so the pressure of time was always hanging over you.
Some audiences would be worried for you. It’s an unusual atmosphere for the spectator, especially if it’s the first time they had watched a show being filmed – very unlike watching a play in a theatre. Between them and the set were the cameras and the assistants running around the place, and the sound-boom guys. It can be pretty intimidating and sometimes the audience would catch that sense of intimidation and freeze up a bit. Sometimes we’d do the opening scene, and the laughs wouldn’t come, even though you knew there were laughs there. If I could sense that the audience wasn’t responding, I would do something stupid or dry on purpose, and then share it with the audience – blame Nick or the lighting crew or the director, or anyone who was to hand. And then the audience would relax. They knew they could laugh and not get into trouble, and by the same token they knew we weren’t taking it too seriously. And then they’d be off. And once they were off, there was generally no holding them.
Only Fools and Horses got off to a ragged and inauspicious start, though. On the first episode, we had three directors in quick succession. Ray Butt trapped a nerve in his back and was taken to hospital in severe pain. (Nick and I went to visit him and took him some medicinal gin and tonic, pre-mixed in a disguised bottle, and some equally medicinal cigarettes, which he very much appreciated.) So Gareth Gwenlan (who was, in due course, to become the producer/director of the show and, beyond that, the BBC’s head of comedy) came across from another show as a temp. Gareth hadn’t seen the script before that day, which wasn’t great. Then, shortly after that, Martin Shardlow was hired as a proper replacement for Ray. I rather lost my cool over this immediate chaos. It was our first night shoot, on our first series, and I so wanted us to get it right – yet here we were changing directors every three minutes. I stormed about the place, muttering, ‘I think they must be trying to sabotage us.’
We survived, though, and, once things settled, it was clear very quickly that we had the makings of a tight team. There were no weak characters in Only Fools, and there were no weak actors. Everybody had something to bring. Roger Lloyd-Pack was RADA-trained, and his father, Charles, was a famous film and stage actor. His performance as the fabulously dim Trigger was so good that one tended to come to the conclusion that Roger must be genuinely like that as a person. He wasn’t at all. He was quiet, unassuming, totally easy-going – and a consummate actor. Not all that long ago, I was watching the television and up he popped, playing a cardinal in The Borgias – which is about as far from Trigger as you could probably get, acting-wise, without putting on an animal costume.
The same was true of John Challis as the oh-so-superior Boycie. John was charming, well spoken, an actor of great weight, and an absolute gent to work with – another proper team player. Then, as the series grew, there was Ken MacDonald as Mike, the landlord of the Nag’s Head. Every episode he was in, you could guarantee that at some point – during the camera rehearsal or in the middle of a set change – Mike would produce a beer mat from somewhere, put a nick in it and lock it on the bridge of his nose, before looking round the room and saying, ‘Who threw that?’ That was his number and he never tired of it. Mike loved the show and the people in it and could become quite emotional about his attachment to everyone. His character in Only Fools wasn’t especially big, but he was utterly committed to it because he just thought it was one of the funniest shows ever and he wanted to be a part of it. I think we all felt the same.
The first series was duly broadcast in 1981 to a unanimous display of … well, relative indifference, really. The BBC didn’t demonstrate any particular urgency to promote the show. Reviewers responded by ignoring it altogether. It was broadcast on a Tuesday evening, which isn’t always the best night to drag in the big numbers. Altogether, it had a kind of under-the-radar feeling about it. We all knew there was massive potential here, but early in a sitcom’s life you never really know what they’re thinking upstairs, in the big rooms where the decisions are made. Only Fools and Horses could have been cancelled there and then, and we would have been gutted, but not entirely surprised.
* * *
I WOULD LIKE to say it was the second series in which Only Fools and Horses really broke through the glass ceiling, but it wouldn’t be strictly true. It was, however, the series in which the show broke through the glass chandelier, so I guess that was something.
One day John, Ray and I were trading stories about working days and stupid things that had gone on in our old jobs, and John told us one about something that had happened to his dad. John’s dad and a couple of his mates would turn their hands to anything to earn a bit of money, and they were doing some odd jobs in a big country house. At some stage, the house’s owner had said to them, ‘We’ve got this pair of large Jacobean chandeliers, which need a specialist to come in and take them down from the ceiling and give them a clean. Do you know anyone who might be able to do that?’ John’s dad chipped in and says, ‘Oh yes, guv – we can do that for you, no problem.’
Because this pair of chandeliers weighed so much, they were bolted right through into the rafters of the floor above, meaning that to detach them it was necessary to send someone to remove some floorboards from the room overhead and unbolt the mooring, while the others stood below, holding on to the chandelier and waiting to lower it to the floor. On this occasion, one of the lads went upstairs to unscrew one of the chandeliers while John’s dad and another lad stood down below ready to catch … the other one. With predictable and expensive consequences. The story really made me laugh. I said to John, ‘You’ve got to use that. It’s too funny not to.’
John said, ‘I don’t know how we could do it, though.’
I said, ‘But the Trotters get up to anything to earn a few quid. Surely we could cook up some way to get them out to a country house.’
John went quiet, and I thought at first he was a bit reluctant to take on the idea. In fact, it was because his brain had already gone into overdrive and he was even then working it out. Sure enough, John came back with an episode entitled ‘A Touch of Glass’, in which the Trotters land up in a stately home and pass themselves off as specialist chandelier cleaners. Their duties require them to remove a pair of thumping great chandeliers, one at a time, from the ceiling of the hall. Grandad disappears off upstairs with a hammer and a screwdriver to undo the bolts from above, while Del and Rodney stand beneath the chandelier with an outstretched sheet, ready to catch it as it drops. There’s the noise of screws being loosened and then, with the most almighty crash, the untended chandelier drops to the floor.
There was a lot of pressure on that piece of filming. The chandelier might have been fake, but it had still cost the licence payer a lot of money and nobody wanted to have to commission another one if it smashed when the cameras weren’t turning. Anticipation was high and everybody an
d his brother had come in to watch – all the crew and production staff and anyone who just happened to be around. When we went up the ladder, I said to Nick, ‘Now, brace yourself, Rodney, brace yourself.’ I wanted the audience to believe that something was about to happen to me and Nick, so they wouldn’t even think about the chandelier in the background. We braced ourselves, and the chandelier beyond us dropped. There was a momentary silence and then I heard the magic word ‘Cut!’, followed by whoops and screams of laughter and rounds of applause. People were rolling about on the floor and Ray Butt had stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth to stifle his mirth. I don’t think the crew stopped laughing for about ten minutes.
At the end of the second series, classic flying chandelier moments notwithstanding, Only Fools was averaging merely 9 million viewers. Contrast Last of the Summer Wine, the BBC’s most popular sitcom at that time, which was generally getting about 16 million. We were even lagging behind Terry and June – and this at a time when everyone seemed to think Terry and June was finished. Worse than that, the previous programme in our slot, Ronnie Corbett’s Sorry!, had been getting 10 million viewers. In other words, we had lost the BBC a million of the viewers who had previously been happy to watch the channel at that point in the week. Those are the kinds of statistics which make television executives start to get twitchy with the trigger finger. We all had to think, ‘Well, it’s been fun, but that’s probably it.’
And then industrial action intervened – and entirely in our favour. In July 1983, a technicians’ strike at the BBC temporarily caused programmes to be cancelled and drove some big holes into the scheduled output. It obliged the BBC to raid the cupboard for old material to fill the gap. The second series of Only Fools and Horses thereby found itself getting an early rerun. More than 7 million people were watching every week – which was quite impressive, given that this was in midsummer, when television audiences commonly dwindle. Suddenly, deep in the heart of the BBC, faith was renewed, the candle relit, the flag run back up the flagpole. John Sullivan was commissioned to write a third series, and, better still, a fourth series beyond that. ‘Ordre du jour!’ as Del might have put it. Only Fools had been granted the time to grow.
* * *
THAT MYFANWY’S AND my relationship could withstand the stresses of renovating a ruined country cottage suggested there was something fairly strong about it. One day, she said to me, ‘Why don’t we move in together?’ All my life I had always resisted any such thing. Indeed, traditionally this was the point in any relationship at which I had always run a mile, causing no little distress along the way. But now I didn’t run away. I felt ready.
The cottage in Crowborough wasn’t really convenient for either of us, except as a bolt-hole, so Myfanwy and I started looking around for a house. In the process of doing up the cottage, I had realised, belatedly, how I liked the country life. As much as I loved London and was brought up in the Smoke, I found the quiet and isolation of the countryside had started appealing to me really strongly. As that noble man of letters Dr Johnson said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he has probably been living in a bachelor flat in Newman Street opposite Micky McCaul for too long.’ I felt I was done with dossing down off Oxford Street, and it came to a point where I decided I would move to the countryside, make my permanent base there, and keep the flat on for whenever I needed to stay in the city for work.
I didn’t really know where in the countryside to go, though. I’d been heading south, from Newman Street, across London, to get to Crowborough and that was always a bit of a chore. So I decided to look north instead. I got a map and a compass and drew circles with gradually increasing radiuses – five miles, ten, twenty, thirty … forty miles was where I set the limit. I eliminated the east, because it was so tricky to get out of London in that direction, and I concentrated on the north and the west, round as far as Reading.
Obviously, generally speaking, the closer to London, the more expensive the house. I decided that twenty-five miles was really as far as I wanted to be travelling – but forget it. That was totally outside the financial bracket. There was, however, a property in Wendover in Buckinghamshire that was thirty-five miles out. I thought that was probably too far, but we went to look at it anyway.
It was a lovely place: a little house with a workshop, backing on to a hill and with a big field next door to it. The garden was lovely and the hill was National Trust property, making it that much less likely, I felt, that we would wake up one morning, draw the curtains and discover that we lived next door to a brand-new chemical factory. On the day of our viewing, which was cloudless and sunny with the birds in full song, the couple selling the house gave us tea in the garden, which was a good tactic. In the car driving away, Myfanwy said, ‘That’s the place.’
I had to push the boat out slightly, financially speaking, to get it. When the sale process was under way, I began to waver a little. Was it too far out? What about the price? I think, even then, the prospect of commitment, solid commitment, troubled me.
But we did it. I sold the cottage to fund it and took out another mortgage. Of course, I had the traditional paranoid actor’s frame of mind at this moment: ‘Will I ever work again and pay for this?’ But we moved in and were very happy and promptly acquired, from a rescue home, a three-legged dog called Peg, named after Jake the Peg, of course, in the Rolf Harris song.
I was working an awful lot at this time; I have always been very driven and determined to fill the hours that way, but this was a period in which I really seemed to be going for it. I was doing Open All Hours and Only Fools and Horses at the same time, for the couple of years in the early 1980s in which those shows overlapped. When the shooting schedules allowed, I was still working in the theatre as well. In 1985, I started appearing at the Strand Theatre in a farce called Look No Hans! with the great and lovely Lynda Bellingham. It was not the best play, perhaps, though it did have one memorable scene when a helicopter was supposed to land on a lawn, offstage, and we had a huge fan blowing and amazing lights flickering and a thunderous sound effect, so there was all this noise and an extraordinary downdraught on the set. We beat Miss Saigon to the onstage helicopter by a full four years.
John Junkin, who lived nearby in Buckinghamshire, was in a play in the West End at the same time, and he and I would travel up and down to London together by train. He was always good company. I had met him hanging about in Gerry’s club, where I invariably had to do my impression of John Wayne for him, which amused him greatly. After our performances, we used to meet in the pub at Marylebone Station, throw a couple of drinks down our necks and then run for the train. I would get home about midnight, have something to eat with Myfanwy, who would wait up, stay up until about 2 a.m. and then sleep through until mid-morning. So life was a bit topsy-turvy but no less enjoyable for that. I was very busy and very content.
* * *
THERE’S A MOMENT in series three of Only Fools and Horses where Del and Rodney are squabbling about the viability of Rodney’s plans to go it alone in business and invest his £200 of start-up capital in the self-catering holiday trade. Lennard, as Grandad, has had almost no lines in this scene – he’s just been a silent presence in his armchair in the sitting room. But now, at the mention of Rodney’s proposed £200 holiday property investment, he suddenly pipes up and says, ‘What you got, Rodney – a Wendy house?’
It’s hard, even now, to summon words that adequately account for the volume of the laughter this line got from the studio audience. The laugh went on so long, it threatened to run into the next episode – and all Nick and I could do was stand there and ride it, while trying not to join in. When we had completed the filming, I stepped forward to say a few words of thanks to the audience, which I always liked to do. This time, just to tease Lennard, I said, ‘That’s it. I’m resigning. Nick Lyndhurst and myself have worked our socks off all evening for this show. Lennard Pearce hasn’t said a bloody word – and then he just says “Wendy house” and he gets the biggest laugh I’ve ever heard in
my life.’
Thus, in 1983, was born the laughter ratings system that everyone on the show used from that day forward. Laughs would be ranked according to their perceived Wendy-ness. A decent line might be scored as a ‘mini-Wendy’. A good line would get a ‘sub-Wendy’. What you were hoping for, of course, was an ‘all-out Wendy’, or a ‘full-blown Wendy’. The ‘full-blown Wendy’ was the holy grail. I have to say, very often, when the Wendy came, it was Lennard’s line. Nick and I used to tease him, saying he was a lazy sod and that we were basically a twenty-minute warm-up act for his one killer gag. Lennard would just say, ‘I’m old – I’m allowed.’
Series three was also when Jim Broadbent came into the series as Roy Slater, Del’s old enemy from school who has turned into a particularly lizard-like copper. Who would have thought that Jim would go on from here to make The Borrowers and then on to Hollywood? I could never work out why he didn’t take me with him.
The ratings were on the rise and the show was finally getting noticed by the critics, who had done a pretty good job of turning a blind eye to it up to this point. I was, according to The Times of London, no less, ‘a comic player of previously unexploited substance’. Well, as painful as it sounds, I was happy to have my substance exploited. We went into series four off the back of a BAFTA nomination for best comedy series, the first time the programme had been considered for such a prestigious award. We all went along to represent the show. In the end, the BAFTA went to Yes Minister. We were the nearlys, but not quites. We were stoic enough about it, though. And also, by that time of the night, thoroughly refreshed.
